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My housemates and I went to the beach for the weekend. One of my roommate’s has a car and so we drove to a hotel his friend owns on this secluded piece of Tulate beach. We BBQ’d, body-surfed and built a giant bon-fire on the sand. Besides a few stray dogs that followed us around begging for food scraps, we didn’t see another living soul the entire time we were there. We had the entire bungalow to ourselves.
- This is the river we had to cross to get to the beach
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The only unsettling part of the weekend was finding used needles along the shoreline. In the span of 15 minutes, I counted about 15 to 20 of them in total. At first I was confused (“How could there be THAT many junkies all shooting up in that same stretch of beach? We’re in the middle of no where!”). But than my housemate explaind that the needles come from the hospitals.
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Apparently in Guatemala, doctors and nurses see no problem with chucking all of their used syringes into the river, which is how they eventually wind up in the ocean. After I learned that, the beach didn’t seem quite so beautiful; the ocean not so clean. When I went swimming again later that evening, I kept envisioning an HIV-infected needle-point jamming into my bare foot. Needless to say, I didn’t go anywhere after that without my flip-flops on.
- “It’s sad,” I told one of my roommates after we avoided stepping on a glass jar of brown liquid. “You can never fully escape reality here. Even when you’re in nature. You go hiking and you have to make sure to hide all of your valuables on you in case you get mugged. If you go to the beach, you can’t walk by yourself because you might get raped and you can’t walk barefoot anywhere because you might step on a dirty needle.”
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My roommate shrugged and then said the line that we use so often here it’s practically become our life motto:
- “Well, that’s Guatemala…”
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What’s that next to the syringe on the last photo?
You mean the coconut?